Gyorgy Hevesy and the Mystery Meat

Gyorgy Hevesy was a bald, jowled, mustached aristocrat from Hungary.  He moved to England to do research in chemistry.  Away from his rich Hungarian foods in his English boarding home, he noticed that the meals the landlady prepared bore striking resemblance to the meals they had the day before.  When he confronted her about the recycling of his leftovers, she denied all charges.  He decided to find the truth behind the mystery meat.  He had discovered radium-D in his lab and hoped to be able to use it to track radioactivity through the bodies and organs of organisms that ingested the radioactive material.  But before that, he decided to use it to investigate his landlady's cooking.  He sprinkled radioactive lead on his dinner one night.  His landlady collected the leftovers as usual.  The next night, he brought a detector to dinner.  When he put it over his food, it went off, signaling the presence of radioactive lead.  He caught her red-handed.

A more notable discovery of Hevesy's was the finding of element 72, dubbed hafnium, in his first try.  The research got him nominated in 1924 for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but political bickering made it so that no one took the gold.  Speaking of gold, Hevesy had quite the interesting time with gold in Nazi Germany.  At this time, it was illegal to ship gold out of Germany and Nazis went around collecting it.  Two Jewish scientists sent their gold Nobel Prizes to Niels Bohr's lab (which was where Hevesy worked) for safekeeping.  The  time came where Nazis knocked on Bohr's door, looking for gold.  Hevesy wanted to bury the medals, but Bohr said that would be far too obvious.  Instead, Hevesy took a caustic mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid called aqua regina to dissolve them.  When the Nazis ransacked the lab looking for valuables, they left the orange beaker alone.  Hevesy had to flee the institute, but when he came back years later, he found the beaker on a shelf, untouched.  He precipitated the gold from the solution and had the medals re-cast.